Toothpastes, heretofore, have primarily been used in conjunction with brushing to remove food particles from the mouth. They have not been effective in preventing the formation of plaque; much less have they removed either plaque or tarter. Often they have tended to damage dental restorations, and in some cases even the natural teeth, or to roughen the surface, resulting in adherence of stains from coffee and tea.
Plaque is a soft sticky film that tends to coat the teeth. Living and dead bacteria or bacterial flora, and especially mucopolysaccharides comprise the plaque. It may also include various bacterial by-products, some of which are irritating toxins. If sufficient plaque accumulates on teeth and goes down into the crevices between the teeth and the gums, gingivitis may result, and the gums may become swollen and inflamed and tend to bleed easily. If the gums are neglected, periodontitis may develop. As plaque continues to grow between the gums, destroying the periodontal fibers that connect teeth to the bone, it causes pockets where more plaque collects. As periodontal disease progresses, an increasing amount of bone and tissue supporting the teeth are destroyed, and the teeth themselves may be lost, due to lack of support. The bone is lost because of the infection process in the pockets.
Plaque in its initial stages may be kept somewhat under control by prolonged and frequent brushing with ordinary toothpastes, do nothing to get rid of the accumulated plaque, and reliance has had to be made on supplementing toothbrushing with flossing programs. Moreover, plaque, though barely if at all visible by itself, collects stains from foods, some alcoholic beverages, and tobacco, that make the teeth look very badly stained.
As the plaque continues to accumulate, it may combine with minerals, particularly calcium, in the saliva to form tartar. Tartar is quite different from plaque, though it has sometimes been called a calcified plaque. Dentists call it calculus. Tartar or calculus is rock hard, is a white or yellowish deposit that, once it attaches itself to the teeth, could heretofore only be removed by scaling it from the teeth and from under the gums during professional cleaning. Tartar is largely inert, but controlling tartar also helps to reduce the amount of cleaning that a dentist need do. And below the gum line the accumulation of tartar may accelerate the progress of periodontal disease, by starting a foreign body reaction in which the body uses the inflammation process to expel the foreign body, which it cannot do since the root is attached to the cementum and the tartar is attached to the root.
Up to now, the main attack on plaque has been the mechanical actions of flossing and brushing, and neither brushing nor flossing has acted to remove calculus.
Recently, some anti-tartar toothpastes have been placed on the market, but these do not even purport to remove what tartar is already there; they claim merely to prevent (to some degree) the build-up of further tartar. Such tartar-inhibiting toothpastes may reduce the accumulation of new tartar by about one-third or more, but that is about the limit of their effectiveness.
In the past some toothpastes made attempts to control plaque by abrasion, but the attempts were unsuccessful or led to very bad side effects. For example, some toothpastes in the past contained strong acids which acted very well to whiten teeth, but ruined the tooth enamel. Actually they were not very effective in the control of tartar or plaque.
Among the objects of the present invention are the control and removal of plaque and tartar. Regular and thorough brushing with the toothpaste of the present invention will prevent--either wholly or to a large degree--the accumulation of plaque and the formation of tartar.
At the same time an object of this invention is to avoid the problem of tooth damage that prior attempts for controlling plaque and tartar have caused. Not only are the natural teeth not damaged, even dental restorations, which are softer than teeth, are not damaged. The abrasive action in the preferred forms of this toothpaste, are sufficiently controlled so that they do not scratch the teeth nor even dental restorations.
When tooth-colored, glass-filled polymers are used for the filling of cavities in anterior teeth and then are polished to a lustrous finish that can be evaluated as smooth, they become clinically stain resistant. Unfortunately, the use of prior art toothpastes on tooth-colored plastic has tended to roughen the surface and leave the surface more prone to picking up stains.
The toothpaste of the present invention has been shown in actual tests to have left the tooth-colored plastic surface not significantly different from that of a professionally polished lustrous surface of the tooth colored polymer plastic. Therefore, it helps the tooth prevent the deposit of stains from food, drinks, and smoking, as well as tending to remove them.
Thus, an important object of this invention is to provide an improved toothpaste that attacks plaque and tartar selectively and can remove plaque and tartar from tooth structure without causing unnecessary wear on the existing tooth structure, that is, the enamel, the dentin, and the cementum.
Another object is to remove stain from the accessible surfaces of teeth without scratching the teeth. In fact, the abrasivity of this improved toothpaste is typically less than that of a smoker's toothpaste, using the American Dental Association abrasivity index on tooth dentin surfaces. It is also less abrasive on tooth colored filled polymer dental restoratives than are the current dental prophylaxis pastes.
Another important feature of the invention is to maintain an acid-base neutrality in the toothpaste, so that the toothpaste has a pH of approximately 7.